Photogrammetry and laser scanning

Within the Dept. of GRS, the Spatial Laser Scanning Lab develops methodology to efficiently extract geometric information on the state of our Earth and its infrastructure using notably different types of laser scanning data. Laser  scanning efficiently  samples the surface geometry of  our  urban  and  natural  environment.  LIDAR systems  on  tripods,  cars, drones,  planes  and  even  backpacks and satellites  are  able  to collect billions  of  3D  points  in  a  few  hours.  The quality of such point clouds is characterized by combining sensor knowledge and geodetic data description techniques. What  remains challenging  is to  automatically extract  valid geometric  information  from  these  point  clouds  in  a  similarly  efficient way. These algorithms are built using tools from fields like computational geometry and computer vision. Efficient implementation of the algorithms, both from a hardware and software perspective, is required to process point clouds at an operational level.